Marketing and distribution essay

“Successful media products depend as much upon marketing and distribution to a specific audience as they do upon good production practices”.

To what extent would you agree with this statement, within the media area you have studied

 

The film I have studied is Star Wars: the force awakens and was released into cinemas in December 2015. The film was directed by an ‘A-list director’ J.J Abrams. I agree with the statement because I think having good production practices and successful marketing and distribution are both important factors when making a film. The force awakens had both good production practices and good marketing, for example they made the audience feel nostalgic by using actors from the original films. Harrison ford, mark Hamill and Carrie fisher all made an appearance which would make it appeal more to those who grew up watching the films, but also appealing to younger audiences by adding some unknown actors to play new characters such as Daisy Ridely as Ray and John Boyega as Finn.

For marketing and distribution, they advertised online using social media which is a good way promoting a new film to a range of different audiences but mainly under 25s.To ensure that Star Wars appealed to a range of audiences they made sure it was a four-quadrant picture, meaning it would appeal to both men and women over and under 25. It attracts bot parents, children, men and women so it would bring in huge amounts of revenue. Star Wars was mainly above the line marketing as this is also a way of targeting larger and more general customers, advertising will appear on TV, posters and souvenirs. They also had many tag ins and joined in with other franchises for example they released Star Wars cereals, posters, water bottles, sweets and colouring books this helps to make a film more appealing to much younger audiences. They also released a Star Wars Lego set which would have got children interested and talking about the film.

Star Wars is a successful media product and is available to watch on blue ray, DVD and download, this is so they can still generate profit once the cinemas are no longer showing the film. This links to distribution of films. The force awakens was filmed on both film and digital and Walt Disney studios were the official distributers. The film was also available to watch on Imax which would have made it appeal to a wider audience. Walt Disney studios motion picture have had experience with marketing and distribution of successful films which could be why the force awakens had one of the most successful and biggest marketing campaigns.

The trailer for the force awakens was not also gripping but was released in many different languages, widening the audience. This was an important part of marketing for this film as to create profit it needed everyone to be interested in viewing the new film. The marketing and distribution for this film was clearly successful as it made $2.6 billion. The revenue from this film meat they could pay the main cast members (Harrison ford, Daisy Ridely and John Boyega) large amounts of money for example Daisy and John received $450,000 each while Harrison got around $23 million. Even though John and Daisy have been in other films, people will start to associate them with the Star Wars franchise from now on.

 The film had good production practices which helped to make the films as successful as it was. They had a $306million budget which meant they could film in various locations such as Abu Dhabi and spend money on quality special effects and filming sets. Another way that they improved the nostalgic was by researching the original film to find out what made them so successful. When they found what made the originals so good they tried to recreate techniques that they used for example using real explosions rather than making them all using special effects, which is a good example of good production practice. Also, technology has advanced dramatically since the first films and as a result it made the force awakens a successful film because of high quality special effects.

In conclusion, I believe that marketing and distribution is equally as important as having good production practices. Both are vital components for successful film productions because if a production is lacking in one of the 2 areas it could mean the film is unsuccessful. A film could have good production practices but not so good marketing and distribution, which would mean the film would be lacking advertisement so therefore the film would get little publicity and result in no revenue. Productions heavily rely on both marketing and distribution and good production practices to make a successful film.  Overall I strongly agree with the statement as I think if a film needs to be successful, marketing and distribution need to be equally as good as the production practice.